Japanese Breakfast, Ginger Root

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Pak Bae

Japanese Breakfast and a lot of food and other items on a table.

Japanese Breakfast

 Michelle Zauner’s indie pop band Japanese Breakfast is an alternative to the pop girlie mainstream, with meandering vocals and chill rock instrumentation. Like its namesake, it’s light, yet satisfying. Cameron Lew’s more conceptual synthy-pop project Ginger Root opens.

media release: Japanese Breakfast shares “Mega Circuit,” the fierce new single from her recently announced new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21st on Dead Oceans. The song arrives with a visual created by Michelle Zauner and frequent collaborator Adam Kolodny.

“‘Mega Circuit’ was one of the first songs I wrote, intent on making a creepier, more guitar driven record,” Zauner explains. “The song is sort of an examination of contemporary masculinity, and explores a conflicted desire to embrace a generation that in the absence of positive role models has found refuge in violence and bigotry. We had the legendary Jim Keltner—who’s played on everything from ‘These Days,’ to ‘Here You Come Again’ to ‘Dream Weaver’—come in and play the fiercest shuffle you’ve ever heard.”

“Mega Circuit” follows the release of “Orlando In Love,” the album’s acclaimed lead single which the band performed a stunning rendition of on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon last week. 

Japanese Breakfast is also expanding her tour in support of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) with recently announced shows in Seattle, WA and Madison, WI as well as additional dates in Brooklyn, NY and Bristol, UK. The tour kicks off with a performance at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, CA and continues with headline shows across North America and Europe this year. The Melancholy Tour is the band’s first tour in three years, following the Jubilee Tour in 2022. All tour dates can be found below and tickets are on-sale now via japanesebreakfast.rocks.

Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist’s favorite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind among other classics — the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.” 

Hot on the heels of two blistering performances at Coachella that attracted attention from places like KCRW and Nylon, Ginger Root announces that the accompanying film for his acclaimed 2024 album, SHINBANGUMI, which aired on Adult Swim’s Toonami over the weekend, will be available via a limited edition VHS. The film combines all of the music videos for the album into one cohesive story that builds upon the world that Cameron Lew has been creating over his various releases.

Ginger Root, who is currently on tour with Japanese Breakfast and joined her on stage for a rousing cover of Gorillaz’s “On Melancholy Hill” at Coachella, is nominated for two Music Awards Japan in the Best International Alternative Song and Listener's Choice categories. Lew is also the only non-Japanese artist who will be performing at the ceremony. The awards take place on May 21st and 22nd. 

SHINBANGUMI was released last year via Ghostly International. His long-awaited third LP finds the multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and visual artist more poised, idiosyncratic, and intentional than ever in a new chapter of life.

On SHINBANGUMI, Lew perfects his handmade yet immaculately polished synth-pop, alt-disco, boogie, and soul — taking shape through his lens as an Asian-American growing up enamored by 1970s and '80s music, specifically the creative and cultural dialogue between Japanese City Pop and its Western counterparts from French Pop to Philly Soul to Ram-era McCartney.